Friday, June 03, 2016

Media Silent as Biggest Protests Since nineteen Sixties Sweep France

from The AntiMedia (republished under Creative Commons
licence)


(ANONHQ)

As the country prepares to host two million visitors at the showpiece Euro 2016 Football Championship in less than two weeks, labor strikes at oil refineries and nuclear power plants; fuel shortages paralyzing
aviation and public transport system; violent street protests; nationwide riots; and a state of emergency until the end of July to cover the Tour de France has proved a major headache for François Hollande — currently the least popular French president since polls began in France. The protests are being called the largest and longest lasting since the French Revolution.

Explosive Trade Union Revolt Plunges France Into Chaos

The first collaborative protest against the Socialist government since Hollande came to power in 2012, kicked off on 9 March. On March 31, nearly 400,000 people took to the streets, disagreeing with the sweeping changes to labor laws; though organizers put the number at 1.2 million.


Mass protests against new labour laws in France

On April 9, about 120,000 people marched in Paris and across France for a sixth time, protesting against contested labor reforms. Organizers called for yet another strike on April 28, and a massive protest on May 1, Labor Day.  Reports of police officers clashing with protesters, deploying tear gas in several French cities, and protesters burning vehicles, smashing windows flooded the Internet.

In his response, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in the city of Lyon:

“I call on the organizers of these demonstrations to condemn with the same firmness that I do the unrest caused by these handful of thugs.”

Demanding a complete withdrawal of the draft reform bill, French workers stepped up protests, rallies and blockades in the third week of May.  As per the latest updates, one in three gas stations across the country run dry, causing long queues at normally well-stocked stations. There are blockades at 5 of France’s 8 oil refineries. Nearly 1/5th of nuclear power output is cut by striking staff. Since the nation’s electricity supply
has dropped, the government is forced to dig into its emergency reserves.

On May 26, more than 150,000 marched against the government’s plans to make it easier for firms to hire and fire. Reuters reports:

“In the southwestern city of Bordeaux, about 100 people targeted a police station, throwing objects and damaging a police car. In Paris and in the western city of Nantes, bank windows were broken and protesters clashed with police. The next
big day of protests is planned on June 14
[when French senators begin discussing the reform package], four days after the Euro 2016 soccer tournament opens in France. The CGT warned it could be disrupted if the government refuses to withdraw the draft reform bill.”


Although French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is willing to modify some of the proposals, workers’ unions are unwilling to back down. Particularly angry that the government is enacting a constitutional power to bypass parliament to pass the bill, several unions led by one of the country’s largest unions, the General Confederation of Labor (or the CGT),declared in an open letter:

“This week, the actions, the strikes and the blockades by workers from a number of industries to demand the retraction of this labor bill and to obtain new rights show that our determination remains intact.”

Plagued by dismal popularity ratings and high unemployment, President Hollande, who staked his whole term in office on improving life for the country’s struggling youth, says the labor reform is vital to tackle joblessness. Labor Minister Myrian El Khomri, too, defends the new labor law dubbed “the bosses law” by its opponents.

This law corresponds to the situation in our country. We have an unemployment rate of over 10% the same as it was 20 years ago. It has improved over the last month, however that is not satisfactory. Our country created fewer jobs than other European countries [Between 2013 and 2015, 57,000 jobs were created in France, 482,000 in
Germany, 651,000 in Spain and 288,000 in Italy.] So for me the text and the goal of this reform is to be able to just improve access to employment.”


However, opponents of the labor reform say it will threaten cherished rights and deepen job insecurity for young people by helping companies fire staff arbitrarily. Henry Samuel and Raziye Akkoc of The Telegraph observed:

“The government believes it will create thousands of jobs but the IMF, and the French opposition say the reform doesn’t go nearly far enough to significantly reverse record unemployment, now at 10%, and soaring public debt, due to reach 98% of GDP next year.”

What Lies AheadThis is the first time a Socialist French government has faced a nationwide trade union rebellion in more than 30 years. The left’s opposition to the reforms has been vast, threatening to tear apart Hollande’s own support base.

The Independent Writes:

The proposed reform has compounded the fury of many within the Socialist Party and the further left at what they see as
the treacherous, rightward course of the Hollande-Valls government. The protests have been led by the former Socialist leader, and ‘mother’ of the 35-hour week, Martine Aubry, who has =resigned from all her official positions within the party. Aubry complains that the rewriting of French employment law in line with ‘liberal’ pro-market dogma is a betrayal of the French ‘social contract.'”


An online
petition
against the proposed changes has gathered over 1 million signatures, a record in France. According to a recent Le Parisien poll, a majority of French people favor labor reforms, but 70%
oppose the government’s way of going about it
.

It will be a political suicide for Hollande if he rolls back the labor reform – he has promised he will not run for re-election next year unless he manages to stem the rise in unemployment. But as The Guardian rightly notes, it is not just Hollande’s political survival at stake, though,
but the image of France itself.


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Silent as Biggest Protests Since French Revolution Sweep France
)
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Six-Figure Fines for failing to use the right transgender Gender Pronouns?

This story broke a few says ago, but I was so gobsmacked by the sheer stupidity of this latest idiocy from New Your liberals I spent a week verifying it all. It was a waste of time really, I should have known that no matter how stupid New York and Californian neo - fascist 'liberals' have been in the past, they can always find a way to be even more stupid in the future.

The left was traditionally the politics of Free Speech, Individual Liberty, personal development and self determination. It was the left that celebrated anarchists, non - conformists, eccentrics and outsiders. Left wig writers and performers thrust obscene words and sexually graphic images into the public sphere and left wing critics supported them. I was a member of the British Liberal Party from the 1960s to the 1990s, tolerance and open mindedness were our watchwords, we tolerated homosexuality but saw no need to glorify it, likewise with abortion - Liberal politicians campaigned for it to be legally available, but not used as a routine form of contraception (watch the British move Vera Drake if you want to know the background to that). Conservatives were the ones who insisted on 'decency' and a kind of moral equivalent of foot-binding that produced many emotionally stunted, judgmental, self righteous individuals. A hypocritical brand of Christianity demanded moral regulation, both within the private sector and from the national and local government, to protect the public from being debauched by the dark forces of bohemianism.

Now, in an era of identity politics, leftists are becoming the ones who censor and and call for free speech to be criminalised, invent crimes like 'hate speech' and ban certain words and ideas they find offensive. This has led to some bloggers and new media journalists (and I'm mentioning no names here) dubbing them 'bansturbators' because they get off on banning other peoples' fun.

Breaking the new language rules of the the illiberal liberals is about to become very expensive in New York.

Washington Post correspondent Eugene Volokh recently broke a story revealing that the New York City Commission on Human Rights has issued guidance that employers, landlords, professionals and businesses can now be fined up to $250,000 for not using an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title, under the New York City Human Rights Law, “regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.”

Legal “guidance” for businesses in New York states: “Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles. Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir.” So, if you willfully and/or maliciously refuse to call a person “they” as preferred, you can be fined.

People will be forced to use “ze”, a made-up word that has no meaning beyond subjective personal definitions, to refer to one person, and then required to use a different pronoun for the for the next person of the same gender you encounter tomorrow. And everybody will have to be au fait with the new terms that some groups, particularly blacks and the Gay BLT lobby come up with an a weekly basis. So far, the pronouns for the various types of transgender freaks include “ze,” “xe,” “ve,” “(f)ae” and “per,” and more. Some even insisted on “Mx.” instead of “Mr.” or “Ms.”

This mandated speech code amounts to a rejection of biology that is far more unscientific than rejecting evolution as creationists do, and yet the people who claim they believe in science are quite happy with it not only because it endorses leftist cultural authoritarianism (a form of moral fascism that has no place in democratic regimes)but because it threatens to make criminals of people based on somebody's subjective response to their behaviour.

For a group who claim to be opposed to privilege, this seems very much like creating a privileged Gay, Lesbian and Transgender caste.

“We can’t even display a license plate that says ‘Live Free or Die’ on our car, if somebody objects to the message because it makes 'ze' feel threatened (by others' freedom?) or hurts 'ze' feelings; that’s what a court ruled in Wooley v. Maynard (1978),” Volokh argued. “But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy.”

What’s more, Volokh warned, the Big Apple grammar police have declared that “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” Thus under New York state law it is a crime punishable by heavy financial penalties. This is not an empty threat, in 2012, Mirella Salemi, a Manhattan-based lesbian chef at a Mexican eatery, was awarded $1.6 million in damages by a New York county judge, because her employer, Edward Globokar, “threatened her soul” and held employee prayer meetings in the hopes of curing her of her sexuality. The fines were upheld in 2014.

President Obama’s dictatorial imposition of a transgender-bathroom policy for all of the nation’s schools makes it clear that if the rent - boy President's anointed successor managed to stay out of jail and gain the Presidency, the federal government will probably follow New York City. The Obama administration has prioritized gay, lesbian and transgenerr issues throughout its second term and has already taken the view that existing federal sex-discrimination laws automatically apply to "gender identity." The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission views it as illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by the "wrong" (i.e. biologically correct) pronoun.

And what is the correct pronoun for creatures that have their wediing tack cut off? Or for people like bruce - Caitlyn Jenner who hold on to their bits but dress in womens' clothes and 'identify' as women? Personally I call the latter chicks-with-dicks. But then I have no intention of visiting New York any time soon.


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